Higher Education and Financialization

I realize I’ve been on a Vijay Prashad kick lately, but, well, he’s amazing. I had some nostalgic feelings listening to this talk since it was given among my old friends and comrades at UMass. (The Graduate Employee Org. (GEO)–my old union–hosted this year’s Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) conference and Prashad was invited to give the keynote.)

His subject, broadly speaking is the financialization (as opposed to “privitization” or “corporatization”) of higher ed. in the US. His analysis is a striking one in several respects. I’m particularly interested in: 1) his contextualization of the cultural/economic shifts in higher education vis-a-vis the return of finance capital to “the West” and the cannibalization of the state under neoliberalism in a wide range of sectors; 2) his discussion of students as consumers and multiculturalism vs. anti-racism and anti-systemic thinking; 3) his understanding of the shifting–rather than shrinking–state in the contemporary moment, particularly with the respect to the state’s role as dispenser of “justice,” from the classroom to the prison; 4) his argument about the necessity of a major cultural shift which would mean defeating the terms of financialization (rather than acceding to neoclassical/financialized logic and being forced to constantly struggle within the warped terms of debate it presents as the “reality” of the situation); and 5) his assertion that we cannot deal with financialization unless we deal with the ways that race is fractured through it, including understanding why concepts like “meritocracy” are fundamentally racist.

Enjoy:
http://www.traprockpeace.org/edrussell/VijayPrishad11Aug07_AImedia.mp3

(Prashad talk actually begins about 2:30 into the file.)

On Black Marxism pt. 1

 I think it might be fitting to try to enumerate the insights that we have gleaned from not only our reading of Black Marxism but also the ensuing discussion. To that end, what follows will be a series of notes which will vaguely follow Robinson’s argument.

Racial Capitalism: The Nonobjective Character of Capitalist Development:

    – What Robinson seems to be challenging in this section is classical Marxist historiography. Specifically, he is critiquing the coherency of class, as opposed to “nonobjective character” of social identities (i.e. race), within the development of the capitalist mode of production. What he finds is that historical constitution of capitalism was neither a radical rupture from existing feudal social order nor a homogeneous transformation in Europe (in the present tense). Instead, what the historical archive reveals is uneven and weak development of capitalism. From the Bubonic plague, the Hundred Year War,  to immense peasent rebellions throughout the 14th and 15th century, bourgeois development was impeded or completely stopped in certain areas. In what way can we possible conceive this process as a clear development within Europe? It is precisely with this question in mind that Robinson wants to forefront the racial dynamics of Europe in the development of capitalism because the organization of labor (namely slave labor) and the formation of the state followed these immenant social categories. As Robinson writes, “The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate–to exaggerate regional, subcultural and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones” (Robinson: 26). The point that Robinson wants to stress is that the development of capitalism did not eliminate feudal social relations but actually perpetuated them by “rationalizing” them. This rationalization is more than the surreptitious maintenance of race/racism within capitalism, as if race is an epiphenomenon of capitalism, but more accurately enabled class formation through the use of state. It is this “rationality” that dominant Marxism unwittingly inheirates from bourgious ideology.

The English Working Class As The Mirror Of Production:

 - One of the preoccuptations throughout the book is a critique of Marxist theory of Revolution and it is within this section that Robinson mulls over its priviledge agent–the proletariat. In classical Marxist theory, the proletariat (i.e. industrial worker) gains class consciousness through the production process because of the alienation of work which is then suppose to lead into the recognition of human cooperation that is also found in work. This is what is meant by “mirror of production.” But the challenge Robinson is presenting is not only concerning the formation of the proletariat but also the formation of class consciousness (i.e. mirror of production). In the former, Robinson wants to highlight that colonialist and imperialist projects are not the “highest stage of capitalism” but instead an essential precondition for organizing the actual “relations of production.” In this case, the English working class should be thought through Irish colonization. In terms of the latter, the assumption of class consciousness to develop from the “factory floor” cannot be maintained in light of how racism is used to preclude recognition of one’s class position, which was the case of the Irish and the English. And so race has not only been the historical rubric for organizing labor but also the means of diffusing class struggle. The point then, is not to consider race (and other social identities) as immaterial and purely of subjective fancy but equally material as class.

- What seems to be clear is that Robinson’s interest in race is to highlight how identities are caught up and enable a whole circuit of political, economic, and social forces by virtue of grounding of epistomologies through particular “rationalities.” In saying that then, an interest in a particular group is not to priviledge a group for its own sake but instead to consider the ways in which “identities” as an epistomological category organizes and is organized by systems of knowledge. In this sense, Robinson project of working through the black radical tradition is to challenge the universal  narratives of western rationality and register the its political limits with its most radical project, Marxism. In doing so, it is not abandon the idea of class struggle but to extend an analysis of class struggle with other forms whereby class is a necessary but incomplete analytic for any project of liberation.

Prisons and the Totalitarian Principle

Below, after much talk, are two articles up for discussion. The first, “Why Are So Many Americans in Prisons: Race and the Transformation of Criminal Justice,” by Glenn C. Loury. Money quote:

To be sure, in the United States, as in any society, public order is maintained by the threat and use of force. We enjoy our good lives only because we are shielded by the forces of law and order, which keep the unruly at bay. Yet in this society, to a degree virtually unmatched in any other, those bearing the brunt of order enforcement belong in vastly disproportionate numbers to historically marginalized racial groups. Crime and punishment in America has a color.

In his fine study Punishment and Inequality in America (2006), the Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western powerfully describes the scope, nature, and consequences of contemporary imprisonment. He finds that the extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates is greater than in any other major arena of American social life: at eight to one, the black–white ratio of incarceration rates dwarfs the two-to-one ratio of unemployment rates, the three-to-one ration of non-marital childbearing, the two-to-one ratio of infant-mortality rates and one-to-five ratio of net worth. While three out of 200 young whites were incarcerated in 2000, the rate for young blacks was one in nine. A black male resident of the state of California is more likely to go to a state prison than a state college.

The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American men and the American state. Among black male high-school dropouts aged 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than three percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program. Coercion is the most salient meaning of government for these young men. Western estimates that nearly 60 percent of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 were sent to prison on a felony conviction at least once before they reached the age of 35.

The article is heavy in sociological method and not without its flaws (it fails to take into account Ruth Gilmore’s work–particularly her invaluable analysis of the state fostered shifts in the global economy that have helped spark the proliferation of US prisons–and it articulates its requisite call for reform via a widespread regime of counterfactual ethics). Aside from that, it is actually pretty informative and thoughtful.

The second article, Totalitarian Lust: From Salo to Abu Ghraib by Eduardo Subirats. It has been instrumental in my development of a critical vocabulary regarding the visual cultural politics of racialized violence. Money quote:

Torture is one among many expressions of human
dominance. It therefore needs to be considered in relation to other contemporary manifestations of the power of the modern state: for example, the technical-scientific destruction of ecosystems; the economic strategies of global genocide; or programs for nuclear and biological extermination. And yet torture is not one more among these various forms and instruments of civilizing domination. Torture is the most privileged spiritual expression of this power.

It would be similarly mistaken to trivialize torture as collateral damage or as the undesired consequence of cleanly operating apparatuses of political or military domination, be they fascist or neo-liberal. The methods and instruments of torture should be understood, rather, as means of central importance because they reveal the sub-structures of the moral, epistemological, and political systems that put torture into practice. This is then perhaps the place to recall two classic interpretations of torture. “Die Waffen sind nichts anderes, als das Wesen der Kämpfer selber,” wrote G.W.F. Hegel in his Phänomenologie des Geistes. Weapons are the essence of their bearers; they reveal the nature of the rational consciousness of the civilization that uses them; and they make manifest the significance of the bloody spirit of universal history. Torture is the intimate expression—the erotic and charismatic expression—of the logos of domination. It is for this reason that it is concealed. The other interpretation to have in mind here is In der Straflkolonie, where Franz Kafka describes the tortured body as a surface on which the rational system of the law is encoded, thus defining the concentration camp as a metaphor of modern civilization.

Torture is a microcosm. Hence, its considerable theological, philosophical, and political value. The physical and chemical techniques of destruction of the person—from the grappling irons and mutilations put into practice by the Holy Christian Brotherhood, to the electrical charges, drugs, violent contusions, prolonged asphyxia, aggressive sensorial stimulation, and sexual violation practiced in centers of military intelligence throughout the Cold War—in short, what we see before us today, is not, as the institutional watchdogs of human rights are inclined to proclaim, the vision of an inexpressible and incomprehensible horror. It is the exact opposite: the calculated expression, at once rational and necessary, that defines modernity, the global capitalist system, or Western civilization as such.

Let us discuss.

On Michael Ignatieff’s “Getting Iraq Wrong”

Having just read Michael Ignatieff’s spectacularly inane article, “Getting Iraq Wrong,” in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I am impelled to respond to the sheer lameness of his political vision as a “professor” turned “politician.” Ignatieff, as he is clear to point out in his article, is a former Political Science professor/liberal critic at Harvard and the author of “The Lesser Evil,” a meditation on the types of compromises liberal democracies should be willing to make in order to maximize “freedom” and maintain stability. He is perhaps best known for his essays in support of the Iraq war, within which he argued that the invasion represents a fundamentally different and moral form of American empire, one committed principally to the expansion of “freedom.” His arguments in favor of the war ultimately, as Nikhil Singh notes in the “Afterlife of Fascism,” resurrect the historical disavowal of racialized conquest central to the logic of American exceptionalism. He is currently a member of the Canadian Parliament, and Deputy Leader of its Liberal Party.

Normally, I would read any other liberal analysis of the Iraq war, sigh, and move on. With a title like “Getting Iraq Wrong,” however, I was initially curious about what he would categorize as an error in judgement regarding his support of the war.

Unfortunately, Ignatieff never actually details what this looks like beyond stating:

The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions. I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds. From that moment forward, I believed he had to go. My convictions had all the authority of personal experience, but for that very reason, I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.

Hence, his article is much less a commentary on the Iraq war itself, but rather about the differences between the thinking he used to do as a member of academia and the thinking he must now do as politician enmeshed in the strifes and struggles of the “real world.” As such, Ignatieff begins his article by making the distinction between the intellectual labor required by what he calls “academics and commentators” and “politicians.” Paraphrasing Isiah Berlin, Ignatieff states:

the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.
I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.
The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality.

I would like to route my critique of Ignatieff through an exposition of Robin Kelley’s “Freedom Dreams,” a brilliant genealogy of the black radical tradition’s articulation of politico-intellectual labor, for it strikes me that Ignatieff’s conception of a “political reality” is profoundly structured in racialized terms. To explain: the black radical tradition, according to Kelley, offered a revolutionary critique of the simultaneously universalizing and exclusionary character of both liberal and Marxist rhetorics and histories. Within these histories, they argued, resides a disavowal of the interlocked racist and sexist practices that have actually given them their shape and global meaning. The conceptions of freedom, reality, and normative politics within these discourses, in other words, are doubled and troubled by a conjoined history of chattel slavery, colonial domination, and capitalist exploitation. In revealing the trace of racialized oppression attending the conception of freedom within U.S. liberal democracy, the black radical tradition released a vision of political practice, grounded in the material conditions of everyday existence, that accounted for the differential forces of social inequality. They thereby framed their visions (dreams) of political collectivity in radically global terms and in radical excess of the parochial scope of political cognition furnished by the form of the nation-state.

While I agree that intellectual labor is distinct from the labor performed within party politics, the black radical tradition sought to undermine the profoundly racialized character of this distinction. (I should state at this point that I consider intellectual labor, broadly conceived, to be concerned with the relationship between power and ideas, and therefore possessed with an account of social inequality). Their radical intellectual labor was twofold: the production of new political universalities, global in shape and scope, that eschewed capitalist hierarchies, as well as a rigorous and widespread organized activism levelled primarily against the U.S. state.

In other words, the (neo)liberal, politico-cognitive conditions that allow Ignatieff to think of the distinction between “theory” and “politics,” or to feel confident enough to state that politicians must have a good sense of reality, are the very same conditions that posit and disavow the persistence of racialized social inequality as “reality.” Or, more directly, “reality” itself is a semiotic disposition of racialized social inequality. Hence, Ignatieff’s account of a “political” reality cannot register the “facts” of the racial state, while his notion of “intellectual” abstraction cannot conceive of the possible modes of social existence released once racialized inequality becomes the object of both intellectual and political labor instead of its disavowed precondition.

Prashad Talk

Came across a great audio file of a Vijay Prashad (bio below) talk from the Life After Capitalism Conference in 2004. I had the opportunity to hear him speak several times in Western Mass.–he’s pretty amazing. Here he’s talking, in part, about his conception of “global fascism” in the contemporary moment.

http://www.radio4all.net/index.php?op=download&program_id=10092&file_id=18572&nav=&

Vijay Prashad is Professor and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Ct. His most recent books are The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New Press, November 2006) and (with Teo Ballve) Dispatches from Latin America: Experiments Against Neoliberalism (South End Press, October 2006). He is the author of ten other books, including two chosen by the Village Voice as books of the year (Karma of Brown Folk, 2000; Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, 2001). He is on the board of the Center for Third World Organizing (www.ctwo.org), United For a Fair Economy (www.faireconomy.org) and the National Priorities Project (www.nationalpriorities.org). He writes a monthly column for Frontline, India (www.frontline.in) and occasionally for Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org).

Coetzee on Torture and the Character of Empire

Just finished J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and thought I’d share two of the most striking passages. Both are in the voice of the narrator, a veteran colonial Magistrate at the frontier of “the Empire” who’s slowly coming to grips with the violences of Empire, his incontrovertible complicity and his inability to effect change.

“[. . .] I wondered how much pain a plump comfortable old man would be able to endure in the name of his eccentric notions of how the Empire should conduct itself. But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. There were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured in till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself. They did not come to force the story out of me of what I had said to the barbarians and what the barbarians had said to me. So I had no chance to throw the high-sounding words I had ready in their faces. They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal.” (115)

“What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one[...].” (133)

Freedom Dreaming

As my inaugural post, it seems fitting to meditate upon the title of this blog. Taken from Octavia Paz’s “Towards A Poem,” Robin Kelley uses it to bookend his writing on the history on the Black radical tradition. In doing so, he teases out what he refers to as the Black Radical Imagination. For Kelley it “is a collective imagination engaged in an actual movement for liberation. It is fundamentally a product of struggle, of victories and losses, crises and openings, and endless conversations circulating in a shared environment” (Kelley: 150). Within this imagination one finds an alternative epistemology that challenges the universalist conceits of dominant western paradigms. In priviledging the black experience, it is not to essentialize their identity but instead to adknowledge the specific epistemo-politico conditions that “Blackness” is indissolubly linked to within modernity’s rise. And yet, this Black Radical Tradition is not simply the Other of the West since in challenging Western epistimological dominance, it offers an alternative vision of futurity. To say it differently, the Black Radical Imagination does not negate but instead obliquily eschews the binary of West and Non-West by being radically immanent to its terms (i.e. blackness renders visible the failed assumptions of western universality) while simultaneously exceeding them (i.e. blackness posits different modes of community without falling into world historicism).

Kelley does a spectacular job of elaborating this point by working out the multiple, and highly imbricated, meanings of dreams through the history of radical social movements like the Pan-Africanist movement, Black Nationalism, Reparations Movement; all, of which, culminates, for him, into surrealism. For Kelley dreams are not just fabrications of the mind (i.e. dreams in the pejorative sense like pipe dream) nor simply a manifestation of desire but both in that it is an immanent vision. It is fitting then that he takes up surrealism since “[i]ts basic aim is to lessen and eventually to completely resolve the contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams” (Kelley: 160). This “contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams” is the analytic purchase that Kelley finds in the Black Radical Imagination. In using contradiction I do not mean this in the Hegelian sense as the contradiction between essense and appearance that is the movement of Spirit but instead I want think contradiction as a historical analytic of the present. For the dream is only impossible in that the conditions from which it arises from cannot (yet) facilitate its actualization within the present. In that way, dream functions as a critique of the present by showing its political limits. However, by the shear fact that it arose from those conditions also signals its potentiality. Understood in this way, the call to “be realistic, demand the impossible” can have no trace of irony.

 So where do we go from here? I think Kelley might provide a possibility. I cannot help but adore the closing chapter of his book where he offers up his own dream–a gesture that can only be read participating within the Black Radical Imagination. In it, he works out an elaborate vision of an international park to take the place of the twin towers. What I find amazing is its details from the way that it will be funded to a set of artwork. Its intricacies makes it substantial. How then, can we use that actual dream as the analytic that I have been trying to work out? What are the epistimo-politico conditions from which that dream comes from but also disenable its actualization? In short, why is that vision impossible at this moment and how can it be enabled?

Notes on “Children of Men” (2006)

Set in England during the year 2027, premised on a future freighted with uncontainable and widespread global violence that itself is punctuated by an equally devastating 18-year worldwide human infertility pandemic, “Children of Men” presents a world for its viewer uncannily containing the precariousness of our own historical, neoliberal moment.
Part science fiction, part dystopia, part tragedy, the film offers a vision of the world in which the stability of the nation-state as the preferred mode of social collectivity has utterly collapsed due to mass migratory movements resulting from either devastating natural disasters, nuclear fallout, or a combination of the two. Only England, as a propaganda video announces through a montage of global carnage, “soldiers on.” It is a hypermediatized society trudging through an immense despair wrought equally by the infertility pandemic if not, more intensely, a state indistinguishable from a permanent war zone—one that, further, is spectacularly militarized and completely unbounded from the task of generating hegemonic consent for the application of its intensified coercive functions. Immigrants of all nationalities, races, and ethnicities are criminalized, incarcerated publicly, and deported aggressively.

Territorially, England is structured as a condensed hypercapitalist geography in which radical class distance (assuming that the mode of social dominance within the film could even be labeled as “class”) exists within intensified spatial intimacy and militarized stratification. It is at this level, then, that the film offers a panorama of the contradictions of the Americanized neoliberal world order taken to a radical, and radically plausible, extreme. Or, rather, the film contains the contradictions and interwoven incoherencies of the contemporary neoliberal world order precisely to the extent that it speculates a future where its logical premises—state deregulation of capitalist industry and finance, privatization of public goods and services, and the obliteration of a social safety net —are taken to their final and violently terminal postulates: “a provocative system of consumption,” according to Eduardo Subirats, “which, regardless of whether it is dedicated to sexual trafficking, the corporate production of ecologically devastating seeds, or trafficking in arms, generates progressive degrees of violence, the exponential growth of hunger, epidemics, death, and the indefinite expansion of war.”

Formally, Children of Men is edited into a series of long, uninterrupted takes in which the camera mostly assumes the perspective of an invisible spectator following the characters, operating in the same partiality of their own field of vision. Yet the film compensates for this partiality by rendering a fascinating tension between the foreground and background of each scene, one in which the plot and characters themselves become the rather arbitrary vehicle for the telling of the film’s worldly context. In many scenes, the camera patiently lingers and hovers over the characters with a distance that is neither too intrusive nor remote. This has the particular effect of both effacing and reinstating consciousness of the camera’s presence for the viewer. It is in this sense that the camera assumes the perspective of an invisible spectator from today, moving through and circling about the characters with an unflinching, partial, and voyeuristic energy only to periodically rest on, say, a defaced mural or a mourning woman holding her dead son. The world within the film’s narrative sphere, in other words, is itself thrust as a protagonist through which we as viewers identify the political and social horizons of possibility furnished through the spectacles of the contemporary US neoliberal state. (This is an elaboration of Zizek’s argument in the film’s DVD extras).

Treating the background of “Children of Men” as we treat a protagonist forces us, then, to focus on the objects and products—the aesthetic flow of goods—that make its world both meaningful for its characters and plausible in its vision of the future for us as viewers. As such, given that the film persistently weaves the specter and spectacle of immigration incarceration within its visual field and narrative movement, it principally engages with the contemporary US biopolitics of immigration regulation and its increasing overlap and confusion with an anti-terrorist discourse of national security. More specifically, the film’s use of immigration incarceration as a spectacle renders alive a tragic counter visual geography of the relationship between US neo-imperial expansion and contemporary immigration regulation—a relationship increasingly maintained coercively through an intensified regime of racialized incarceration.

And yet the film reveals a state in which no imperial conquest is rendered visibly articulated to the unabashedly violent purging of all immigrants—a state, moreover, whose regulation of its territorial sovereignty, while still racially structured, is no longer executed along coherent racial lines. What is rendered visible, however, are the cages in which immigrants are contained. We see them situated publicly in train stations and outside dilapidated project housing, confining a multicultural and multinational population. Their multicultural and multinational character doesn’t signify the evaporation of racialized subjection. Rather, it signals the production of a public for whom subjection to the coercive, terrifying, and violent tactics that have historically characterized racialized subjection—slavery, imprisonment, segregation, torture, indefinite detention—is now a generalized potential inevitability of social existence. In their caged visibility, the incarcerated immigrants are simultaneously specter and spectacle—that which must be removed yet displayed as an emblem of hypermilitarized, coercive power. Theirs is the spectacle achieving the violent reincorporation of national coherency through the expansion of terror and fear. It is the form of terror the state has historically reserved for the procurement and perpetuation of colonial dominance, only now it has achieved the status of a universal.

Perhaps this lends insight into what is arguably the most horrifying scene within the film: the violent, hypermilitarized setting of Bexhill Refugee Camp. The rampant violence executed by the guards as the bus carrying Theo, Kee, and Miriam initially enters the camp is rendered as a spectacle of simultaneous order and chaos. Alongside scenes of heavily armed guards relentlessly beating newly arrived inmates we see ordered rows of hooded individuals, forced to kneel with their hands behind their head. As the camera, whose angle again assumes a spectator locked within the confines of the bus, pans through the scene, we also see a row of medium sized cages in which two to three individuals rest on their knees as their arms are bound to the walls, confined in semi-prostration, with chains and bright orange belts. The bus stops and light floods the cabin as more guards with dogs enter to perform random searches. As Miriam is both beaten and removed from the bus while fervently distracting the guards from Kee’s impending birth, the camera tracks her removal by setting it against the background of a cage containing a lone hooded figure, standing on a small stool in what appears to be a burlap sack, whose outstretched arms are attached to nothing. Hence, as the bus continues moving, the camera tracks a rapid sequence of orchestrated brutality rendered visible through a political aesthetic furnished by the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. It is a succession of events in which we see more guards force a black hood over Miriam’s head and shove her to the ground. Her precedence within the camera’s field of vision is replaced by the lone caged prisoner who is then passed and replaced by a line of half naked individuals, standing alongside an armored truck, being inspected by dog wielding guards.

Even while this scene’s reference to the Abu Ghraib photographs is relatively explicit, its formal delivery is worth pausing over for a moment. The scene’s use of a long, unedited take successively renders each instance of torture visible and contained tensely against the foreground of Kee’s crying and shocked face. The tortures enter and pass the camera’s line of vision in a type of uninterrupted montage of horror and brutality. In mobilizing Abu Ghraib’s political aesthetic as the modus operandi of state power within the film’s own narrative sphere, Children of Men confronts the profoundly virtual and performed character of that aesthetic. It is in this sense that the film polemically engages with the hypermediation of the war on terror and the centrality of torture and incarceration as spectacle within contemporary US state power.

On one level, the scene is a cinematic representation of torture referring to an actual practice of torture that itself found public legibility as a photographed, spectacular scandal. The tortured and incarcerated within the film are, like the Abu Ghraib inmates, rendered as both violently malleable and observable objects, individuals whose splaying figures equally as a spectacle and a disciplinary tactic, if not the profound confusion of the two.

The scene, in this sense, portrays performances of torture whose utility operates equally as an emblem of the film’s “objective” world as it does for the current US visual field, furnished by the war on terror, that fetishizes visual mediation as the simultaneous representation and fictionalization of social truth. That is, like Abu Ghraib, the film depicts a representation of torture whose performed symbolism violently intrudes into the narrative’s “realistic” tone, and visa versa. Cuaron’s use of the long, uninterrupted take to render the tortures visible, therefore, has two principle effects. On one hand, it forces the viewer into a mode of self-reflexivity (a spectacle of a spectacle within a spectacle) that radically rearranges our sense of the relationship between the past, present, and future. By virtue of this self-reflexive aesthetic, on the other hand, the scene compresses the actual history of Abu Ghraib into a virtual future dystopia, figuring the present conditions of US state power into, according to Subirats, a “somber spectacle that simultaneously incorporates a totalitarian political and military machinery and a genocidal principle of annihilation.”

This compression in temporality prompts our recognition of state power in profoundly tragic terms. “Tragedy,” according to David Scott, “may offer us some guidance in reconceiving the moral-political predicament of a postcolonial present…confronted by the seemingly intractable dilemmas of modernity.” The film’s spectacularly tragic performance of torture reconfigures our sense of possibility, reorganizes our cognition of temporal continuity, and renders visible the monstrous “mix,” in Michael Taussig’s words, “of the violence founding law with the violence maintaining law.”

Instead of rendering the Abu Ghraib tortures as an aberration of state power to be overcome as the occupation of Iraq continues, the film posits these acts as state power as such, par excellance, and in total impunity. The spectacular sense of tragedy occasioned by the film prompts us to conceive of an expanding and intensifying coercive US neoliberal state apparatus whose fetid underbelly of liberal values is now outliving the shell of its ideal, self-possessive aspirations. Through tragedy, “Children of Men” indicts the incarcerational regime currently tangling together the “war on terror” and immigration regulation by figuring it as the expression of a US neoliberal state whose substructure of racialized violence increasingly exists as its preferred mode of power. The scene is a tragic spectacle that reveals our contemporary neoliberal moment as one producing, through the specter of incarceration, the simultaneous intensification of sovereignty and rightlessness.